AI War 2 v0.782 Released! “Viewport Visibility”

Right! I’m very excited about this one, it has a lot of long-desired pieces of polish in it. And some bits that were not long-desired, but are exciting all the same.

The settings menu is better organized, and doesn’t have any more non-functional bits in it.

The camera controls, in terms of how sensitive each bit is, can properly be configured again.

Tooltips can be sized in general, so that their text is not so huge if you’re on a huge monitor.

Same with the sidebar! And the top bar! And notifications! The whole HUD, really!

The default size of most HUD elements and tooltips is somewhere around 80% as large now as it used to be, since most people felt it was too large. But now you can configure them!

Rather than having one monolithic “GUI Scale,” which really is a bit nonspecific, there are four or five key areas you can size independently.

And you can now scale the icons of ships! They’re also smaller by default, now. Same with the wormhole names.

You can actually skip drawing the 3D models of ships entirely, if you want to — for instance if you’re on a right potato of a GPU. The game is fully playable in a just-icons fashion, if you wish.

Tooltips now SAY LESS, aside from being better-sized. This is a huge thing I’ve been wanting to do for a month or so. By default, they no longer explain game rules or give extra-comprehensive stats on every aspect of a ship.

However, you can now hold Ctrl to see the full tooltips that you’ve been having up until now. Or you can toggle those to always be the full tooltips, if you like. But frankly the abbreviated ones are a lot easier to work with.

Most of this stuff, so far, basically makes it so that you can see the main view a lot better, without the HUD and icons crowding you out.

We also fixed a bunch of bugs and clarified some things that were unclear.

And improved the tutorial a bit, particularly with some mis-spellings.

There are also a couple of more difficult quick starts now available, thanks to Puffin.

If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you’ll see a variety of options. You can always choose most_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it’s a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire.

The Usual Reminders

Quick reminder of our new Steam Developer Page. If you follow us there, you’ll be notified about any game releases we do.

Also: Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn’t have to be much more detailed than a thumbs up, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that’s how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support.

About Arcen (Ar-ken) Games

Originally known for our unusual and highly effective approach to RTS artificial intelligence in our debut title AI War: Fleet Command, we have since branched out into many other genres and styles of games.

As you can tell by browsing our catalog of titles, our interests are eclectic, and we have a particular affinity for blurring the lines between unlikely genres.